Dinesh D’Souza Claims Tucker Carlson Stopped Covering Jan. 6 Tapes Because Fox News Is Silencing Him

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Dinesh D’Souza discussed Tucker Carlson’s recent coverage of video footage from the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of former President Donald Trump, speculating that the reason Carlson hadn’t shown more was because he was being silenced by the top levels of management at Fox News.

Earlier this month, Carlson featured selected clips from the more than 40,000 hours of footage that Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) allowed him to exclusively access. The footage shown by Carlson largely showed nonviolent moments from that day, along with the top-rated Fox News host’s commentary that only “a small percentage” of the rioters were “hooligans” who “committed vandalism,” and claiming the “overwhelming majority” were “peaceful,” and “ordinary and meek.”

The slanted presentation by Carlson drew sharp condemnation from prosecutors, the family of Brian Sicknick, and the chief of the Capitol Police — and even congressional Republicans denounced him for downplaying the violence and seriousness of the breach of the Capitol during the certification of the 2020 Electoral College votes, when so many key members of the federal government were present in the building.

D’Souza began the over six-minute-long segment by criticizing the Jan. 6 House Select Committee as a “propaganda factory” and accusing the Capitol Police of having a “game plan” that “anticipated” the attack and including “having plants and infiltrators in the crowd” to act as agents provocateur.

He then turned to Fox News’s handling of the footage, claiming that there was a “99% possibility” the decision was made at the “highest levels,” meaning either News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch himself, or his son CEO Lachlan Murdoch:

Now let’s turn to Fox News. Tucker Carlson on day one released some clips and they were like, wow, look at all this stuff coming out about the shaman guy. Look at all this stuff about Josh Hawley jogging across the corridor. Look at all this stuff about Brian Sicknick and then — nothing.

The second day when we’re supposed, scheduled to be a day of more footage, nothing. And then you’re like, well, it takes time to go through the stuff, whatever, it’ll surely come out in the next day or the next day or the day after that, or this week. Nothing. And it looks like that’s it. It looks like the — I won’t say the fix is in, but I will — it looks like somebody dropped the hatchet on Tucker Carlson.

And I don’t know of any other way to look at this. I mean, obviously, one way to look at this is that Tucker reviewed the 40,000 hours of footage and realized that, you know what? By and large, I found just three clips and that’s it. That’s all I got. Tucker isn’t really saying.

But the other possibility, which I give it — this is the 99% possibility — is after the first day. And that’s remember, Chuck Schumer went on the Senate floor, “Rupert Murdoch, I demand that you stop Tucker Carlson.” And then guess what? Somebody stopped Tucker Carlson.

And who would have the power to do that? No, it’s not the, it’s not the, it’s not even Suzanne Scott, the CEO of Fox News. These are orders that are coming from above. And that would mean most likely either Lachlan Murdoch, the son of Rupert Murdoch, who is sort of the de facto guy that people at Fox report to — or Rupert Murdoch himself.

Rupert Murdoch, we know, is feuding with Trump. How do we know this? Because some very interestingly — and this all seem to happen simultaneously — all the organs under Rupert Murdoch’s control, of which I named three — the editorial page of The New York Post, the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, and the Fox News Channel — all simultaneously turned against Trump. So it’s not as if you just have guys at these these outlets, they’ve all made independent decisions. No, again, this is a corporate decision from the highest level.

As Mediaite editor-in-chief Aidan McLaughlin observed, D’Souza “comes so close to cracking the case here,” acknowledging that Carlson “found just 3 clips,” but “concludes instead that Tucker was silenced.”

D’Souza wrapped the segment by mentioning the internal emails and text messages from Fox News executives and on-air personalities revealed in the Dominion litigation showing them “laughing and deriding” Trump and his supporters, but “at the same time they’re very aware that they need the MAGA crowd, they need the Trump stories to keep Fox News in the kind of massive, massively profitable, high ratings cable network that it is.”

“And so you’ve got a very duplicitous two-step in which they try to give the MAGA people just enough while at the same time satisfying the feuds and vendettas that apparently the Murdoch family is now a part of,” D’Souza concluded.

Fox News did not reply to Mediaite’s request for comment.

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